Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Eating sleep, and burping


Further to The Sleep Eaters, in which four "increasingly disturbed" creatives have volunteered to be locked up. surveilled, and deprived of sleep, the "protocol" is now live. 

The subjects have been inside the controlled environment for 4 days now, and it's starting to get interesting. It's quite obvious at this point that they have lost all sense of what time or day it is, and the effects of the accumulating sleep debt are becoming more apparent. The project blog makes fascinating reading. The Subjects will be appearing during Adelaide Writers' Week which is sure to be entertaining.

Having my own very special relationship with sleep deprivation, I'm following along with great interest. I'm waiting to see if any of the subjects reach that point where dreams become untethered from their moorings, and start seeping into waking consciousness. It opens a very different kind of space in your creative process. Only last week, one of my dreams grew primitive legs and wriggled its way into my waking consciousness, where it has burrowed and started to metamorphose into a brilliantly detailed and intriguing story world.